Economy / February 27, 2026
The world’s largest crypto exchange often operates beyond the reach of the law. Now it’s helping to enrich the Trump family.
Donald Trump and Binance, partners in power.
(Avishek Das/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images) During his time in office, President Donald Trump became richer than any American politician before him. He didn’t do it alone. Perhaps no company has provided as much financial and logistical support to Trump’s cryptocurrency empire – the engine of his newly acquired wealth – as Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange. Binance has become the primary market for World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s main crypto business, which has sold billions of dollars worth of its tokens. Binance employees themselves wrote the code for 1 USD, Trump’s stablecoin pegged to the dollar.
Poised to become the world’s dominant crypto exchange, Binance has also become known as a financial conduit for cybercriminals, fraudsters and activist groups. Under President Joe Biden’s administration, former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (known as CZ) spent four months in federal prison after pleading guilty to violating anti-money laundering laws. The company agreed to pay a $4.3 billion fine – one of the largest in its history – and stay largely out of the U.S. market. Biden’s SEC also filed a civil suit against Binance, which accused the crypto exchange of various violations, including market manipulation, illegal servicing to U.S. customers, and mishandling customer funds. (SEC filings alleged that billions of dollars in corporate revenue flowed through foreign companies controlled by CZ and never seen before Name of Chinese co-founder Guangying Chen.)
Under President Trump, everything has changed. Last May, the SEC dropped its lawsuit. In October, Trump pardoned CZ. According to The Wall Street JournalBinance has also worked, with Trump’s support, to ease government oversight on the exchange. Earlier this month, CZ assisted a crypto summit hosted by World Liberty Financial at Mar-a-Lago, where guests included Eric Trump, Donald Trump Jr., the chairman of the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, as well as top executives from the crypto industry and Wall Street.
With its legal and regulatory constraints loosened, Binance is now accused of behavior which, as Newspaper put it down gently“echoes some of the same concerns that have captured the attention of the United States in 2023.” According to several reportslast November, Binance took down an internal team of investigators who discovered 1,500 Binance accounts in Iran, where the exchange was operating in violation of economic sanctions. Only two of these accounts had moved $1.7 billion crypto value in accounts possibly controlled by the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. One belonged to an entity that also acted as a supplier for Binance, indicating that it was more than your average crypto trader. Investigators also discovered that Russian officials used Binance to pay crew members for its “ghost fleet” of oil tankers that avoided international sanctions stemming from Russia’s war in Ukraine. After Binance investigators published their findings in the company’s organizational chart, several were fired and others were reassigned.
Without an official headquarters, Binance is an unusual global organization. Having started in China before moving to Japan and then Malta, Binance now calls itself a “decentralized” operation, although much of the business appears to be run in crypto-friendly regions like the United Arab Emirates and the Cayman Islands. Binance has also maintained a presence in France, where CZ has already taken a selfie during a dinner with President Emmanuel Macron. Last year, French authorities announced an investigation in Binance for money laundering and tax fraud.
Facing investigations around the world, Binance has demonstrated adaptability and resilience, surviving the imprisonment of its CEO, a bizarre standoff with the Nigerian government over alleged currency manipulation, and its constant search for more welcoming jurisdictions from which to operate. Presenting itself as a tool for financial liberation and offering free educational courses on crypto finance, Binance has made deep inroads into the Global South, particularly parts of Africa, Pakistan and Southeast Asia. While the Newspaper reported As Binance has become less cooperative with government requests for data and legal assistance, the company presents itself as a law enforcement partner, posting on social media the blockchain forensics training sessions it offers to investigative agencies around the world. Binance claims to train local cops to combat the very type of crime that has thrived on its platform.
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Having been replaced by a lieutenant as CEO during his incarceration in federal prison, CZ no longer officially runs Binance, but he is still widely associated with the company, and the culture and practices he established appear to persist. In 2020, a report in Forbes– whose claims were later supported by legal documents filed with the SEC – described a “Document on Tai Chi” proposing a new Binance corporate strategy. This memo proposed that Binance would serve its small U.S. branch as compliant with U.S. regulations while the main Binance entity, without jurisdiction, would continue to serve U.S. customers illegally. More recently, a number of compliance staff have left Binance, often posting paeans to their peers on LinkedIn while steadfastly ignoring all allegations of financial crimes that have taken place under their collective watch for years.
For a US president whose sons and business partners are deeply engaged in crypto-finance networks stretching from El Salvador to Abu Dhabi to Singapore, there could hardly be a better partner than the world’s most influential crypto company. The benefits go both ways, as evidenced by a $2 billion deal in which UAE government company MGX purchased a stake in Binance using World Liberty Financial’s $1 stablecoin. Instead of transferring 2 billion real US dollars to Binance as part of this deal, MGX sent the money to World Liberty Financial in exchange for two billion stablecoins worth 1 USD, which Binance happily accepted as payment. MGX secured its stake in Binance; Binance gained a new shareholder while becoming the primary marketplace for a hot, politically connected new token; and the Trump family’s crypto empire secured $2 billion to invest in U.S. Treasuries. Later, in an apparent continuation of the quid pro quo, the Trump administration allowed UAE companies to acquire highly coveted Nvidia chips whose export was generally subject to strict quotas.
After recent reports of possible Iranian government entities using Binance to move billions of dollars, Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut wrote to Binance co-CEO Richard Teng. demanding “records and information related to Binance’s role in Iranian money laundering and its repeated failure to prevent its illicit use by sanctioned entities, terrorist organizations, and other criminal actors.” Binance “has been aware for a long time” of how its platform is being used, Blumenthal charged, but instead of tackling the problem, it tried to cover up the abuse by firing its own investigators.
There could hardly be a more explicit allegation of wrongdoing leveled against a company that agreed to pay the largest fine in American corporate history. But under Trump’s kleptocratic administration, Binance’s alleged sins matter far less than its cozy relationship with this country’s leading crypto entrepreneur. After pardoning CZ, Trump claimed to not know who the founder of Binance was. But the president then added that he had heard that CZ — who was living overseas but came to the United States to accept a plea deal — had been the victim of a legal war, just like him. By any reasonable external assessment, this is not true. But when billions of dollars flow into the Trump family’s coffers, the truth ends up becoming a worthless asset.
Jacob Silverman Jacob Silverman is the most recent author of Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the radicalization of Silicon Valley. He is also the host of Understood: making muska limited series of podcasts from CBC.